Page:Frank Stockton - Rudder Grange.djvu/223

Rh "Just wait one minute, if you please," said Euphemia; and she beckoned me out of the room.

"Don't you think," said she, "that we could keep him all night? There's no moon, and it would be a fearful dark walk, I know, to the other side of the mountain. There is a room upstairs that I can fix for him in ten minutes, and I know he's honest."

"How do you know it?" I asked.

"Well, because he wears such curiously-coloured clothes. No criminal would ever wear such clothes. He would never pass unnoticed anywhere; and being probably the only person in the world who dressed that way, he could always be detected."

"You are doubtless correct," I replied. "Let us keep him."

When we told the good man that he could stay all night he was extremely obliged to us, and went to bed quite early. After we had fastened the house and had gone to our room, my wife said to me:

"Where is your pistol?"

I produced it.

"Well," said she, "I think you ought to have it where you can get at it."

"Why so?" I asked. "You generally want me to keep it out of sight and reach."

"Yes; but when there is a strange man in the house we ought to take extra precautions."

"But this man you say is honest," I replied. "If he committed a crime he could not escape—his appearance is so peculiar."

"But that wouldn't do us any good if we were both murdered," said Euphemia, pulling a chair up to my side of the bed and laying the pistol carefully thereon, with the muzzle toward the bed.

We were not murdered, and we had a very pleasant